Weekend Box Office: ‘Solo’s Grosses Are So Low

There was a time when there was no surer thing at the box office than a Star Wars movie. But now after Solo: A Star Wars Storyplummeted in its second weekend in theaters, dropping more than 65 percent and grossing just $29 million, those days feel like a long time ago indeed. Here is the full weekend box office chart:

Film

Weekend

Per Screen

Total

1

Solo: A Star Wars Story

$29,296,000 (-65%)

$6,687

$148,888,692

2

Deadpool 2

$23,325,000 (-46%)

$5,606

$254,652,438

3

Adrift

$11,510,000

$3,818

$11,510,000

4

Avengers: Infinity War

$10,371,000 (-40%)

$2,905

$642,869,932

5

Book Club

$6,800,000 (-32%)

$2,146

$47,316,748

6

Upgrade

$4,458,000

$3,060

$4,458,000

7

Life of the Party

$3,455,000 (-35%)

$1,376

$46,300,620

8

Breaking In

$2,815,000 (-34%)

$1,674

$41,346,015

9

Action Point

$2,315,000

$1,139

$2,315,000

10

Overboard

$1,975,000 (-37%)

$1,608

$45,523,194

What to say about Solo? It now has grossed just shy of $148 million in the U.S. For most movies, that would be fantastic, but in the galaxy of Star Wars those are not good numbers. By the time it wraps up its run in theaters, it likely won’t outgross The Empire Strikes Back, which made $209 million in theaters in 1980 (the equivalent of $640 million in 2018 dollars). It’s not doing much better overseas either; its worldwide gross to date is just $264.2 million. Don’t expect the sequel the film teased; do expect a serious rethinking on the part of Lucasfilm of their spinoff strategy moving forward.

The biggest new movie of the weekend was Adrift, the survival thriller starring Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin. The film grossed $11.5 million in about 3,000 theaters around the country. But audiences that came out for the film gave it just a B on CinemaScore, which doesn’t bode well for its box office future. The box office present for the weekend’s other new wide release was even worse; Johnny Knoxville’s Action Point, about his misadventures in a dangerous water park, grossed a pitiful $2.3 million. That ranks among the 25 worst wide releases in history, and is less than 10 percent of what Knoxville’s last stuntfest, Bad Grandpa, made in its opening weekend.

From a per-screen perspective, the big movie of the weekend was American Animals, the crime film starring Evan Peters and Blake Jenner that’s also the first movie co-distributed by MoviePass. In four theaters around the country, the film grossed $140,629, for a PSA of $35,157. In second place was the re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which grossed $69,000 on five U.S. screens. (Nice.)